


Informed and Dangerous

by DCLynneHaddock



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Betrayal, Gen, His Last Vow Spoilers, Moriarty is Alive, Sherlock Series 3 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-16
Updated: 2014-03-16
Packaged: 2018-01-15 23:28:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1323268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DCLynneHaddock/pseuds/DCLynneHaddock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>But how? How had Moriarty known that Sherlock was leaving and who told him? (Set after the events of the third series.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Informed and Dangerous

“There’s something…” Sherlock mattered, pacing back and forth across the living room in the anxious manner that meant his favoured thinking pose- sitting perfectly still with his fingers steepled in front of him- had failed.

John glanced up from his paper, brow furrowing slightly, “How d’you mean?”

“Moriarty’s return,” Sherlock snapped, like it should have been obvious. “It’s too perfectly timed. Just as I got rid of Magnussen; just as I was about to vanish again. He must have known that he had to act or lose his chance.”

John folded his paper and set it aside before responding, using the time delay to choose his words carefully, “You think he was waiting for you to deal with Magnussen before he made his big comeback?” 

“Not necessarily.” Sherlock’s tone was impatient. John was a step behind him as usual and the consulting detective couldn’t be arsed with it today. “But he wouldn’t have come back while I was engaged with Magnussen, not while my attention was elsewhere.” He spread his hands, “But then I was about to be exiled, forcing his hand without realising it.”

“Forcing his hand how?”

Sherlock spun on the spot to face John, “Think about it. It would be no good making his big return if I wasn’t here to see it. Even if his original plan had been to hold off a little longer, he couldn’t let me leave the country and wreck it for him.”

“Modest as ever…” John murmured.

Sherlock waved a hand dismissively, turning to resume his pacing, “You know how Moriarty is, John. Don’t be trite. He likes to have the right audience and we both know that he considers me to be an effective spectator.”

“Because you encourage him.”

Sherlock stopped pacing again to fix John with a glare, “I do not.”

John just picked up the paper again; satisfied that Sherlock had no great revelation to impart for the moment. It was just more of the jitters that had surfaced since his plane had touched back down on English soil. “Yes, you do. You both get off on watching each other work. You let him in here one time without trying to arrest him. You engaged with him on the roof.”

“He had snipers. I could hardly try to attack him.”

“Even so.” John turned a page in his paper. Sherlock eyed him for another moment. Yes, he could see just how John would have handled the rooftop confrontation. All stoic expressions and limited responses, not rising to any of the bait that Moriarty lay. “You still haven’t told me what your point is,” John remarked after a minute or so, ignoring Sherlock’s thoughtful stare.

Sherlock’s gaze refocused into a look of derision, “I need to tell you? John, try using the grey matter between your ears for once. How much time passed between my arrest and my attempted exile?”

John thought for a moment, “It was overnight. About thirteen hours?”

“Less than twelve hours. Magnusson’s death hadn’t even been formally announced when I was boarding that plane.” He resumed his pacing. “Yet he knew.”

“What the hell makes you think he knew?” John asked incredulously, paper forgotten in his hands as his eyes followed Sherlock’s movements.

“I don’t believe in coincidences, especially not where Moriarty is concerned. The only possible conclusion I can come to is that he has a spy somewhere among the…dozen-odd people who knew that I was being exiled.”

John stood up from the sofa now, the paper falling forgotten to the floor, “But how is that even possible?”

“I don’t know,” Sherlock muttered reluctantly. “Anyone working with the government would have been thoroughly screened. The only outsiders who knew were you and Mary.”

“You think he could have bribed someone?” John queried, but Sherlock could hear a faint note of relief in his voice. Glad that Mary hadn’t topped the list of suspects. Clearly still on edge after his wife’s betrayal, although Sherlock could see that their reconciliation was progressing well.

“Infinitely possible, but it would have to be someone that’s been there for a while. Not just in the government, but under Moriarty’s thumb. This is someone who got lucky with being one of the select few to hear this. Only senior government employees in the right department would have been privy to this information so quickly.”

John trailed his tongue along his lower lip anxiously, thinking, “So what do we do?”

“I can’t take this to Mycroft without something concrete. He told me I was being paranoid; that I was prone to conspiracy theories where Moriarty’s concerned.” John said nothing. Sherlock knew that meant that he in part agreed with his brother’s hypothesis. Sherlock merely cast him a disparaging look and carried on pacing. “Think, John. Who knew that I was leaving?”

“I don’t know! Mycroft didn’t exactly give me a list!”

“Think!”

“Fine!” John sank down to sit on the edge of the sofa again, pressing his fingers over his eyes as he tried to recall. “Apart from the four of us… Whoever arrested you, whoever wanted you to go on that mission, probably Mycroft’s superiors…?”

Sherlock nodded, “Okay. Good. And, of them, who might have links to Moriarty?”

“How would I know?!”

“Okay, okay, let’s approach it this way, then.” Sherlock was slowly but surely boring a permanent groove into the living room floor. “How would they have contacted him?”

John shrugged, “In ten hours or so? Almost any way. They could have attached a note to a snail.”

“Though that would hardly be the most practical means of communication,” Sherlock intoned. John’s lips twitched slightly in response. “Do we think that Moriarty already had his little trick in place?”

“Probably not, but it wouldn’t take him long. A few hours max.”

“But that at least narrows out time window.” Sherlock tapped his steepled fingers to his chin, “Six or seven hours to tell him. And we can take off another three for my sentencing to be decided.

“Four,” John corrected. He’d done nothing but clock-watch in that time.

“Which leaves a two or three hour contact window.”

John blew out a breath, “With modern technology, all we need is a thirty second contact window.”

Sherlock shook his head, turning away from John and sliding his hands up to cup his mouth. “That’s still leaving too much to chance. What if his man hadn’t been one of the ones informed? He wouldn’t allow for even that slim margin of error. No, it has to be someone whom he was certain would be there. Someone who’s always there.” It all suddenly clicked into place. “Oh…” Sherlock spun on his heel.

John was still looking at him, head inclined slightly to on side as usual. But a harder expression sat where the gently bemused smile usually lay, an expression which belonged to someone who knew exactly what was going on. As they stared into each other’s eyes, John raised his pistol slowly between them to banish any lingering pretence.

“Of course…” Sherlock breathed. “No luck needed. You’re always there.”

“Expecting a medal?” John asked softly. The gun was steady in his hand. “We were expecting you to twig ages go.”

“You’ve always been his, haven’t you?”

“Yes.”

The simple honesty did nothing to ease the tension in Sherlock’s chest. “Everything Moriarty knew, everything he was able to do, was down to you.”

There was a pause before John chuckled. It wasn’t malicious, just the same chuckle he always used when Sherlock amused him. If not for the gun, it could have been a perfectly normal discussion. “There it is.”

“There what is?”

“This is the moment where you try to comfort yourself with the idea that you’re more intelligent than he is, right?”

“If all of his information is second hand-”

John rolled his eyes, “Like you don’t use your homeless network all the time.”

“I-”

“Maybe you are smarter. Who knows? He’s still _better_ than you are!” Exasperation showed in the furrow that appeared on his brow. “You still don’t get it, do you? Moriarty isn’t better than you because he’s more intelligent. He’s better than you because he knows how to acquire and use every single piece of information he can. You’re a genius, sure, but half of what you know just sits around in your head gathering dust until you get the opportunity to impress someone with it. It’s a waste.”

“I wait for an audience while he creates one to satisfy his own ego.”

John laughed again, “I don’t think the pot has any right to slag off the kettle, do you?”

Sherlock studied him for a second longer, “Are you Sebastian Moran?”

John’s lips made that familiar slow curve. “No, I’m not.” Calm. Steady. Truth, Sherlock assessed. “Moran has more important things to do than get stuck with babysitting detail.”

Sherlock ignored the insult. Impractical to respond when he didn’t know how much time he had. There were more pressing matters. “Why do I need to be watched?”

A grin now. “Well, you’re a bit unpredictable, aren’t you? You have a small tendency to put yourself in harm’s way without a second thought and we needed to make sure you stayed alive until Moriarty had a chance to prove himself to you. You see, he really just wanted to play with you. Like children, the pair of you.” The gun shifted slightly. Restless, not fatigued. Not yet. A trained soldier could point a gun for as long as he needed to. That part of John’s back-story was evidently true. “So I was sent in to make sure you didn’t get overzealous and end up dead. More importantly, we needed you to establish a home base; a reason to stay in London.”

“And you became that reason.” Sherlock fought the urge to allow his emotions to convey themselves in his stance, though his hands itched to clench. He’d been manipulated, completely and utterly.

“I’ll admit, you had us a little worried after that stunt at St. Bart’s. But you came back eventually. To London. To me. Your steady, dependable Doctor Watson.”

“How much of you is truth?”

John shrugged a shoulder, but his gaze was still faintly cool despite the casual gesture. “Almost all of it. The best lies are a version of the truth, you know that. I was an army doctor. I got honourably discharged. Then I got an offer shortly after getting back to London. Get your attention, and keep it, then I would have enough to live on.”

“And what if I hadn’t bitten?”

Another shrug. “I would’ve joined the long line of rejects that’d been placed on your trajectory over the years. I wasn’t the first person that Moriarty threw into your path and I wouldn’t have been the last. But being newly discharged and already having connections to Bart’s, I was a godsend. And, fortunately, your type. But it could have just as easily gone the other way. The end result would still be the same for you. Just a different face over here.”

“And you would be at home with your pregnant wife.”

“Maybe. But that’s not the timeline we’ve ended up on, is it?”

“Why would you join him?”

John offered him a condescending look, “Why do you think?”

“Money.” Sherlock had suspected, though had hoped that it wouldn’t be that predictable.

“It makes the world go round, Sherlock. An army pension doesn’t go far in London. I was too recently discharged. No surgery wanted to take on a doctor who might have post-traumatic stress disorder that he hadn’t learnt how to handle yet. I’d spent a lot of my savings trying to help Harry get sober. Moriarty made me an offer.”

Ex-military men were probably an excellent source of labour for someone like Moriarty. Already disciplined, already trained in combat and weapons, likely disillusioned with the state of play. “That’s why you were able to forgive Mary so quickly,” Sherlock commented. “You understood all about trying to maintain a deception.” Another thought occurred to him. “Does she know?”

John smiled, “She does now. It was hardly fair to keep her in the dark when she’d proved that she was so able to keep a secret. She was surprised, but understands what desperation can lead to. Of course, we’ve had to make it look like I’m finding her betrayal harder to take. The honest, stalwart John Watson couldn’t possibly forgive a lying wife so easily, could he?”

“You’re the only two people that I haven’t been able to read.” Fitting that they should end up as two halves of a whole.

“Does it irk you?” John cast his eyes up slightly to the right, remembering, “I was shakier at the start, but just being out of therapy helped me there as well. Made you give me that tad more leeway to settle into the role, to work out what you wanted from me and how I could make myself indispensible.”

Sherlock studied him narrowly now, “But you must have enjoyed it on some level.”

“Of course. You’d have sensed something otherwise. And all your assessments of me have been right. I like the thrill of running around with you- gives me the rush that I lost for a while after being discharged.” There was something that looked a little like regret in his eyes, “It’s a shame you’ve had to go and wreck it all.”

“What are your orders now that I know?”

“Termination.” John’s gaze flicked to the gun and back to Sherlock. “Bit of a pisser, really.”

Sherlock drew in a slow breath. He was running out of time. They both knew it. But there was something in John that was still preventing him from pulling the trigger. They’d known each other for almost five years now. It would be impossible for John to absorb himself in the role convincingly for that long without developing some sort of affection for Sherlock. “You don’t have to do it,” Sherlock said softly.

“Don’t I?”

“Moriarty doesn’t have to know I know. We can keep the status quo until he’s gone for good and he has no hold over you. After that time, you can go your own way if that’s what you want. You have your own income now. You don’t need the money.”

“They already know.”

Sherlock took a single step back and swept his gaze over the living room critically. Everything was so familiar to him. He’d thought he’d known every item. “The flat’s bugged.”

“Has been from the start.”

“You could still run.”

John looked resigned as he shook his head, “Yeah, but this is where getting married comes back to bite me. I gave him a family he could watch. If he even suspects that I’m not following his orders to the letter, he could take that family from me faster than you could imagine.”

“But-”

“I could risk myself, but not her. Not _them_.”

“There are ways to fix this. You don’t need to-!”

“But I do, Sherlock!” John snapped. “Because this is what I do. I fix your damn messes and make sure you’re still around for Moriarty to torment. I make sure that your big brain doesn’t get you killed. But now I can’t do that any more! Your big brain has finally got us into a situation that I can’t fix!”

“But killing me-”

John shot him a quizzical look, then burst out laughing. The sound was completely at odds with the hard tension curled in Sherlock’s stomach. “Kill you? Oh, god. You still don’t get it… The termination order isn’t for you.”

Sherlock’s mind went blank. “Then who-?”

John glanced around the room speculatively, “It’s going to take you ages to clean this up, but it’ll keep you in London at least. He’ll be here soon.”

The gun pointing at him was just to keep him still. John had been delaying because he’d known that the clock wasn’t ticking down to Sherlock’s demise but his own. John was no longer useful to Moriarty, so had to take himself out of the game. The bastard gave, and the bastard hath taken away. “Don’t,” Sherlock whispered.

John looked at him sadly, “Tell Mary I’m sorry.” That said, he raised the gun to his own head and pulled the trigger.

**Author's Note:**

> Just a little idea I've had lingering in my head since I watched the episode. Thanks for reading and please leave kudos and/or your comments if you enjoyed it!


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